Geopolitical Monitor - Situation Reports: foreign policy analysis and the latest world news headlines

According to the Israeli organisation Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), Palestinian patients are increasingly being asked to make an impossible choice: Either to become collaborators with the Israeli intelligence apparatus - or to remain in Gaza without medical treatment.

The intensifying conflict in Pakistan's Swat valley has once again called the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons into question. If present instability spills out of Swat and becomes widespread, an American military operation to secure Pakistan’s nuclear assets may be forthcoming, albeit very unlikely to succeed.

A stockpile of documents about hundreds of Guantanamo Bay detainees, some written by the prisoners themselves, could be destroyed under a little-known provision of a federal court order the Bush administration obtained in 2004.

A recently released defense white paper by the Australian government signals Australia’s entry into a widening Asia Pacific arms race.

A United Nations’ Special Tribunal trying the assassination of the former Lebanon Prime Minister orders the release of four pro-Syrian Labanese generals held in connection with the investigation.  Hezbollah is poised to move Lebanon towards Syria and against the U.S. and its allies.

The swine flu outbreak raises a lot of fears.

Here’s one you might not have thought of yet: The Pentagon may be taking over more and more of our civil society in this crisis.

The spread of a possible flu pandemic could see an increase in already heightened levels of government intervention in economies and financial markets as a result of the global financial crisis.

As the nation struggles to make sense of a wave of new revelations regarding the "harsh interrogation techniques" brought to bear on detainees by the CIA, two very different narratives are shaping up to describe the treatment of captured al Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah in April and May of 2002.

At least five bomb attacks in Iraq in the past 48 hours have left some 140 people dead, wounded dozens more and raised fears that the country may be returning to the sectarian violence from which it has only just emerged.

The cohesion of the Pakistani state has faced many challenges in the past decade, but none as grave as the threat posed by the radicalization of its North-West Frontier Province (NWFP).